This is where the party ends

This is where the party ends
I can't stand here listening to you
And your racist friend
I know politics bore you
But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you
And your racist friend

-- lyrics from Your Racist Friend, They Might Be Giants

I haven't done a lot of "personal experience" blogging thus far, and I'm reluctant to begin, because it inevitably involves narrating encounters with real people who have no idea they may become fodder for my ramblings. But what I'm trying to convey here is so closely connected to my impressions of personal encounters -- to my "sense'' of things -- that I can't think of any other way to go about it. Forgive me, in what follows, for taking the long way around; it's part of my attempt to be personal without getting too personal (or specific), if that makes any sense.

I am not Jewish, but since September 11, I have been obsessed with the idea that the vicious attack on America uncovered previously hidden currents of surprisingly virulent anti-Semitism in the world. I was going to say the attacks "triggered" the anti-Semitism, but I think it's clear by now that the ancient prejudice which has increasingly reared its ugly head in the post-9/11 world is not a new creature, but a very old one which has recently, if sporadically, emerged from its dark hiding place. Occasionally, in conversations with my husband, I became so overwrought about this idea ("Somebody needs to DO something!") that he assured me I was overreacting, that no mainstreaming of anti-Semitism was taking place, that all was right with the world. But this was the same charmingly naive guy who -- when we were grad students together -- hadn't understood why I'd gotten so suddenly tight-lipped in a conversation with a Jordanian student who had begun by decrying popular representations of Arabs in the media and ended by reminding us, "Well, it's no surprise, of course. You know who controls the media." (My husband thought he meant corporations.) So despite my husband's good intentions, I wasn't comforted.

Since my initial panic, of course, the blogosphere has abounded with articles and editorials about the rise of anti-Semitism.

Since then, too, I have had a Jewish friend tell me that his mother was confronted, in conversation with "friends" who didn't know she was Jewish, with the notion that the "Jews" were responsible for the WTC attacks; I have heard a distant cousin laugh about how the "Jews" always stick together and comment that he would never vote for Lieberman, because "then they'd really hate us." And yesterday, at a small gathering, I heard a friend of a friend (a bona fide European) rattling on about the situation in the Middle East, about that "neutral observer" Robert Fisk, about the brutality of the wall in Israel, about the problem created by the "fact" that America always protects "the Jews," and -- to top it off -- about the renowned "obnoxiousness" of the Jewish people. I was struck -- dumbfounded, really -- by how un-self-consciously he expressed himself, as though past social experience had taught him to regard such pronouncements as un-controversial. I felt slightly disoriented, as though I were simultaneously standing within a moment in time and watching that moment from the perspective of history. I felt the weight of the millions of such moments that had chipped away at the moral foundations of an entire continent, and -- despite the way my previous "panic" had prepared me for this -- I felt shocked to discover that the moral erosion continued.

I felt constrained by a misplaced sense of politeness, and by my own social cowardice, from protesting too vehemently against the opinionated European. I wish I had remembered the conclusion of Jeff Jacoby's excellent editorial about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe:

What the world should already know but so often forgets is that Jews are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. Anti-Semitism is like cancer; unchecked, it can metastasize and sicken the entire body. When civilized nations fail to rise up against the Jew-haters in their midst, it is often just a matter of time before the Jew-haters in their midst rise up against them.

That's something we'd all do well to remember at this difficult moment in our own history.